Elon Musk has announced that X, formerly known as Twitter, will fully fund legal bills on behalf of anyone who has been “unfairly treated by their employer” for their activity on the social media platform.
Writing on X, Musk said: “If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill.”
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The billionaire, which took over the social media platform last November, said there was no financial limit on how much the company would spend.
Adding: “And we won’t just sue, it will be extremely loud and we will go after the boards of directors of the companies too.”
The announcement comes after Musk announced that content creators on X will receive 100% of ad revenue made by their videos – a U-turn from his previous initiative of keeping 10% after the first 12 months.
Musk rebranded X at the end of July, shortly after he announced that the platform was still negative in cash flow due to a 50% drop in advertising.
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By GlobalDataThe eccentric billionaire countered the point by pointing to a substantial rise in users, claiming X had seen a “new high” with over 540 million users logging in.
Social media is booming compared to last year
The news comes as the value of capital raising deals in the social media industry has seen substantial growth in 2023 compared to the last two years – which experts believe could be down to an increased interest in AI.
According to GlobalData’s deals database, the value of deals made in social media for 2023 YTD totals $18.8bn. This is considerably more than the entirety of 2022, which raised just $10bn.
It is not yet clear if the total value of 2023 deals will reach the height of 2020, which saw $39.6bn raised in the industry.
Amelia Connor-Afflick, analyst at GlobalData, believes the increase this year is likely due to social media company's focus on AI development.
"These projects are significantly more expensive than traditional social media technology so the companies will have required more capital than previously to fund this," Connor-Afflick told Verdict.
Meta, for example, recently announced the upcoming launch of "Meta Personas", multiple AI chatbots with a range of different personalities.
Similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, Meta has reportedly been manufacturing chatbots that are able to have “humanlike discussions” to incorporate into its platforms.
Connor-Afflick notes that the value of social media deals has not reached the high level it saw in 2020, before the economic downturn and pandemic took hold.
"Confidence, however, seems to be growing again as the companies take on new and bold AI projects in their restructured and streamlined models which they require significant capital for," Connor-Afflick said.
Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Disruptor data, which tracks all major deals, patents, company filings, hiring patterns and social media buzz across our sectors. These signals help us to uncover key innovation areas in the sector and the themes that drive them. They tell us about the topics on the minds of business leaders and investors, and indicate where leading companies are focusing their investment, deal-making and R&D efforts.
